I have this vision of Yoast sitting at his machine, with a damp towel wrapped around his head, coding hard. I'm going to go make a donation to at least cover a pizza and some energy drinks right now :)

@Aahan have you actually got this 'new' plugin working yet. I have just installed it, along with the latest update of WordPress SEO, and its still not working. Can't see anything about News sitemaps in any of the admin page for WordPress SEO??

After realising some breaking news earlier today wasn't showing in Google News, I realised that the news section had gone from the admin panel. I've installed the new plugin but have no options for it within the WordPress SEO settings. My site depends on Google News for much of its daily traffic so it's important we get this plugin sorted! :) Looking forward to hearing the latest.

It is to do with a flag not being set; AFAICT if the 'enablexmlnewssitemap' option flag isn't set then the sitemap plugin isn't loaded, and the place where you turn this option on is tucked away in the sitemap plugin, so you have a Catch-22 situation.

The solution is to edit the news sitemap plugin file, comment out a line to force the plugin to load, then go and enable news sitemaps on the XML sitemaps page of the main seo plugin. Then you just uncomment the line in the plugin again and you're all set.

Include in News Sitemap checkbox has to be checked for every post — yes, it doesn't seem to obey the post-type settings in Google News Sitemaps settings section of WP SEO.

The same applies for Google News Genre as well. I have it set to none in settings screen, but in posts it defaults to "blog" for some reason.

What's the purpose of Default Keywords in the Google News Sitemaps settings section of WP SEO? I can't find them anywhere in the News sitemap. As for each post, ONLY "Tags" are being shown as <news:keywords>.

I have a problem with this news XML plugin, as well. The plugin generated a news XML feed, but it's empty. I have opted to include posts in the news xml, and when I go to posts, they are checked to be included in the feed, by default. However, the XML sitemap is empty.

I would like it populated with all my old posts. Maybe I'm not understanding how this works, and it's only supposed to contain timely, new posts and not archives. Am I doing something wrong?